Shawn Mendes partners with manager to launch film and TV production company

The pop singer has joined manager Andrew Gertler in launching Permanent Content, a company that will focus on scripted and documentary projects that reflect issues important to young people. The first project is a doc about himself. – Yahoo News

Canada Revenue Agency: Claim This $500 Tax Break Starting in 2021

I f you’re interested in saving a little money on your taxes, the Digital News Tax Credit could go along way. That is, assuming you’re eligible for it. To get the digital news tax credit, you need to have paid money for subscription media in 2020. That includes online newspaper subscriptions and other paid media services. The media outlet you subscribed to also has to be approved. The main criteria is that the news outlet be Canadian. If it’s any mainstream Canadian newspaper, it’s likely approved. The catch is you will get back $75 on the cap of $500 spent on subscriptions. – The Motley Fool

Trump may lose, but he’s not defeated … despite the media’s efforts

The media may take credit for the Biden victory, as it conducted the campaign; almost no one voted for Biden, an undistinguished and bumbling wheel-horse who was on his way to the political glue factory until he was rescued by the Democratic party elders to prevent a victory by Marxist Sen. Bernie Sanders. The media’s credit for that is mitigated by the terrible failure of the phony polls and predictions of a great repudiation of Trump, and the further erosion of public trust in the media to levels that are far below those enjoyed by the president it laboured so relentlessly to destroy. – Conrad Black, National Post  (FYI addendum: Trump pardoned Black, the former media mogul who was jailed for fraud and obstruction of justice in the US, shortly after he wrote a book praising the US president.)

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How China could shape the future of technology

California’s Silicon Valley shapes our lives. From the websites where we do our household shopping to the video-streaming services we watch to the companies which provide our email, almost all are based in this corner of the United States.

Until recently, that is. The rise of TikTok, an app whose parent company is the Chinese firm ByteDance, has struck at the heart of Silicon Valley’s supremacy. Along with other digital products coming out of China, TikTok has the potential to reshape the future of technology – a future in which the culture and the interests of Shanghai or Beijing could mould the industry more than that of San Francisco Bay. – Chris Stokel-Walker, BBC

Why so many artists are selling off their song catalogues

When the internet got involved in music, everything changed. Sales tanked and cheques shrank. That retirement fund was no longer assured. This goes a long way to explaining why so many heritage acts from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s — think Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and Guns N’ Roses — went back on the road. They had to make up for that lost revenue somehow. David Bowie was the first to find an equitable solution with his so-called “Bowie Bonds”. – Alan Cross, Global News

Peloton rival Echelon launches fully-licensed music offering for fitness classes

Seattle-headquartered MediaNet, which was acquired by SOCAN in 2016, will provide licensing, catalogue, and rights management services for Echelon through its MediaNet Enterprise product integration, which allows music applications to access over 85 million tracks. – Music Business Worldwide

Netflix does the right thing for comic Dave Chappelle by pulling his show

Chappelle posted a video to his Instagram page titled “Unforgiven” in which he explained his reasons for pulling “Chappelle’s Show” from Netflix after not being paid by ViacomCBS. The video was filmed during a recent stand-up set and the comedian is urging his fans to boycott sites streaming the material. – Zack Sharf, IndieWire

Bertelsmann to buy Simon & Schuster for C$2.17B in cash

German media giant Bertelsmann said Wednesday that its Penguin Random House division is buying rival Simon & Schuster, in a megadeal that would reshape the U.S. publishing industry.

Penguin Random House, already the largest American publisher, will buy the New York-based Simon & Schuster, whose authors include Stephen King, Hillary Clinton and John Irving, from TV and film company ViacomCBS for $2.17 billion in cash. – The Canadian Press

France starts collecting tax on tech giants

France is going forward with its plan to tax big tech companies. The government has sent out notices to tech giants, as reported by the Financial Times, Reuters and AFP. There could be retaliation tariffs on French goods in the U.S. – Tech Crunch

Google signs copyright agreements with six French newspapers

The announcement follows months of bargaining between Google, French publishers and news agencies over how to apply revamped EU copyright rules, which allow publishers to demand a fee from online platforms showing extracts of their news. – Reuters

Amazon patents technology to track down copyright pirates

Instead of encoding the identifier or watermark in the video content, Amazon proposes to add it to the manifest data. As a result, Amazon’s solution can be more easily applied at the individual level. This can be useful to protect content on Amazon’s own streaming service, but other rightsholders may want to use it as well. – TorrentFreak

Live at the Whisky

Mick Jagger and Steve McQueen held court from its tufted red booths. Beautiful girls frugged in cages above its dance floor. The most famous club in rock history, the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, launched a generation of music, from the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield to Frank Zappa and the Doors. – David Kamp, Vanity Fair archives

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